Abstract EN:

As no etruscan historiography has reached us, our sources on the history of ancient tuscans are drawn essentially from greek and latin texts. These texts deal with the problem of etrurians people only in a fragmentary, and very often biased way. Thus, from those graeco-latin literary sources, one can witness the emergence of several images of the ancient tuscans, whose origin already puzzled the ancients; beside the image - a positive one - of the most religious of all peoples, one has to acknowledge the negative images of cruel barbarians, pirates or debauchees. It is the latter aspect, traditionally called truphe, according to the term used by ancient greek authors, that the present study aims at analysing. The first chapter, after an historical account of the question, endeavours to provide a definition for the concept of truphe - luxuria in latin sources -,that is to say a soft and voluptuous way of life, to determine its conditions of appareance and evolution. It then presents a corpus of greek and latin texts in relation with this image of the tuscan people. The second chapter is devoted to one of the essential sources of the etruscan truphe: a long fragment of theopompus of chios, centred on the etruscan woman and on the banquets of ancient tuscans. One can note the ethnographic character of the text, which follows along the lines of herodotus, and the realities of etruscan society in which it could find its origins, and of which it offers a distorted echo. The third chapter is a study of a long fragment of diodorus of sicily, which follows posidonius of apamea and reveals information on etruria which is of an essentially roman origin.